seeing green

Dec. 13 issue - Even when he‘s getting his Saturday-morning espresso at Starbucks, Bill Ford Jr. can‘t escape the pressures of being Detroit‘s best-known environmentalist. On his days off lately, the automotive scion and CEO of Ford Motor Co. has been buttonholed by greenies demanding to know why he hasn‘t come out with cars that run on air. That‘s right, air. A tiny company in Luxembourg claims to have invented a car that powers the pistons with compressed air (it promises to put them on sale next year, but the company has failed to deliver before). Since that "breakthrough" news hit the morning shows in October, Bill Ford梩he self-described "environmental industrialist"梙as been inundated by people accusing him of hiding magical air cars in his company‘s garages. "People think we have these things squirreled away somewhere and that we‘re artificially suppressing them," he says. "You know how crazy that is?"